What follows is a response by me to some questions about BNIM posed by a researcher starting to use BNIM. The questions and hasty answers may be of interest to others.

Further comment would be very welcome.

I am very grateful to the researcher for posing the questions....

I have been studying the interpretation sections of the  [Detailed Manual] and have a few questions that I’m having trouble finding answers to in the document.

 

Regarding the use of data from the different sub-sections.

My current assumption is that the BDC/BDA is written up with information drawn from all three sub-sessions. Is this correct?

yes, this is correct. You need all the factual socio-historical information you can get.

 

 

I’m not clear however on the TSS/TFA. Is it the case that SS1 and SS2 should be analysed using the chunking/sequentialization/summarizing tools?

Yes. Ideally, unless SS 2 is too long to make this practical, then you should try to use the practice of sequentialisation throughout. However, don’t forget that you can move between very general sequentialisation chunks and very small ones: somewhere I use the metaphor of a camera suspended above a forest in which the operator decides when to move from a default meso-position to one close up and when to move to a more macro height and lose some of the detail. I deal with this I think to some extent in my 2001 textbook.

 

 

And then I would assume that data from SS3 is used as like a sort of ‘garnish’ is the metaphor in my mind at the moment, to the ‘meat’ of the SS1/2 focused analysis.

I think that’s quite an interesting metaphor, and I hope you find it a useful one. Obviously, it depends a bit on what you did in sub- session 3 and how the person reacted. To say anything very useful, I would need to look at least one full transcript to see what you did do, how you did structure it, in an actual sub- session 3.

 

 

 

If this is the case then I’m not sure how we account for the fundamentally different nature of SS1 and SS2 (improvised/more elicited). IN all your writing on the TSS and TFA are you assuming that you treat SS1/2 (i.e. the first interview in its entirety) as one narrative ‘flow’, or is there to be some distinction drawn between one and two in this way?

I would say that a very important distinction needs to be made between the first two sub sessions. Sub- session 1 has a very open narrative-question and it flows without any further prompting by the interviewee. However long or short it is, the important thing is to try to understand the structure of this as a pretty free improvisation.

What is the order of the topics, what are the text sorts with which each topic is treated, what are the relative lengths of the treatment of any particular topic, what are the topics which one might expect a rise but are not treated at all, or virtually not at all? What is the actual drift of the actually told story (compared to the logically-possible told stories, see my 2001 textbook QRI pp. 269-73). I tried to suggest how to describe the significance of the actually-told ss1 initial story on QRI pages 280-83 and there are further discussions of the TFA of the initial sub session 1 in the BNIM Detailed Manual on Interpretation.

 

Having completed the TFA (originally called (thematic field analysis, now called Teller Flow Analysis) of sub session 1,  this should provide you with a strong set of hypotheses about the subjectivity of the Teller telling the story in sub- session 1.

 

You then move on to sub session 2.

 

Although the menu of topics and cue-phrases continue to be provided by the interviewee from what they said in the first sub- session and what they go on to say in the second sub session, in the second sub session it is the questioning and non-questioning, the probing-for-PINs and the ceasing-to-probe-for-more-detail, on particular cue-phrases  by the interviewer that is the leading ‘structuring factor’ in sub- session 2.

 

This makes it very different from sub session 1, and you need to be very careful to distinguish material from the two sub sessions.

 

Why is this important? An example comes to me from the interviewing of Harold, the key example in QRI.

 

Harold is typically a provider of very many anecdotes, narratives with pins, in much of his interview (especially in the mines before the 1984-5 miners’ strike) However,  In sub- session 1, his reference to his mother’s death when he was 11 is not an in-pin at all, but an event which is given great causal weight but in subsession 1 is not itself described.

 

In sub- session 2, we chose this very swift allusion as a cue phrase on which to push towards in-PIN detail. To our surprise, Harold in sub- session 2 talked at great length with great feeling about the period of his mother’s death.

 

In ‘interpreting the whole two interview sub- sessions together’, we would not typically put the one fact from SS1 together with the 10 facts (this is a clumsy metaphor) to represent Harold as a whole “in the narrative interview” as having given us 11 facts about his mother’s death. The interpretation would stress the contrast between the freely-improvised reference in SS 1 and the interviewer-extracted references in sub- session 2 and try to interpret the difference.

 

 It could be because Harold in a miner-masculine way thought that we were not interested in personal stuff but only in his professional life; it might be that this aspect of his personal life was much too sensitive to suddenly come out with at the beginning of SS1, and he needed interactive time to decide whether or not to trust this. It might be that the telling of the story in sub- session 1 made him think at the end of it about what was not sufficiently there, and so he wanted for his own self to explore more of the personal, and luckily we asked him a question that enabled him to do that.

 

There are many other possible explanations and here is not the time to go into them. The point I want to make is that the material from the freely-improvised sub session 1 and the material from the interviewer-structured chosen pushing for pins in sub- session 2 needs to be thought of as separate, rather than just simply added together as 10+1.

 

 

I’m concerned about this because, as I’m sure you’ve had in previous cases, SS2 is of most interest. Especially given I’ve been interviewing young people, quite a few of the SS1s were very short.

I wouldn’t say myself that SS2 was of “less interest”. I would say that it is of “different interest”, but just as interesting.

 

Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson in their very useful book ‘Doing qualitative research differently’ don’t ask for unified single stories; they would probably agree with you that the semi-structured-by-the-researcher sub-session-2 is “of most interest”.

 

 For various reasons which I can’t go into now, I think that this is mistaken . See section C2 in the BNIM  Detailed Manual volume II on BNIM, FANI, and psychoanalysis; and a soon forthcoming 2018 book on research methodology for exploring  the unconscious edited by Bob Hinchcliffe and Kamena Stamenova--  to be published by Karnac/Routledge--   with a  chapter  by me on ‘BNIM and the unconscious’.

 

BNIM subsession 2 is a place where the BNIM interviewer is fully in charge of what topic is narrated about and what topic is not; BNIM subsession 1 is the only place where the interviewee-narrator is in full charge of the sequence of topics, the degree of narration/non-narration, the extent of telling and everything else.

 

Therefore I would say that BNIM subsession 1 (free narration responding to the SQUIN) is at least as interesting as the more-constrained part-narrations the selection and pursuit of which depends on the interviewer (less-free ‘cue-phrase-cued narrations’).

 

Neither subsession 1 (open-narrative responding to SQUIN) nor subsession 2 (part narrations responding to selected and pursued cue-phrases) on their own would be half as interesting as are the two together!

 

 

And where is Sub-session three in all this? At the moment my approach would be to wait until I’m synthesizing the two tracks, and then use (reasonably contexualized) bits from SS3 (in which I asked mainly questions about meaning, i.e. what did you mean by that/what did that mean to you) to enrich the case-account.

I’d love to see an example of your ss3, but the approach described above seems a good careful procedure in principle.

 

When doing the BDC/BDA, if you are doing a full biographical study (i.e. asking about their life story in general), the sorts of ‘imaginings of alternative ways the life could have gone’ would be unbounded – there might be multiple life-course vectors you might be imagining (school, work, family, friendships, etc). However when doing a more focused BNIM study as I am, where your SQUIN has been more pointed (asking about story of relationships and sexuality rather than whole life story), I take it that your imaginings of alternative ways changes to become more focused i.e. to that particular vector of their life (their developing sexuality and relationship experiences, etc). However, of course, biographical details unrelated to sexuality and relationships are still highly relevant and important to the story so it becomes an interesting challenge!

 

Apart from agreeing with you in the above paragraph, I don’t have anything special to say except, of course, that given a relatively focused SQUIN the other material about these “biographical details unrelated to sexuality and relationships” that they feel are relevant to understanding the focal-topic are very likely to be of great interest “highly relevant and important to the story”.

 

The trick is to try to understand why they bring in details which are formally-speaking “irrelevant” but for them and their system of personal relevance are highly relevant, in a way that they may not be able to articulate and that you will have to work hard to grasp.